You have a great product or service and you built a beautiful website and a landing page to make people interested in your business. You’re waiting for the lead roll in. But, it seems like everything has ground to a halt. You’re unable to understand why in spite of huge traffic the conversions are not significant? You’ve ruled out every technical issue and still, you’re failing to get leads or conversions. So, where would you turn now? Here’s the right place to start. In this post, I’ll walk you through some of the common problems with few simple tweaks I’ve personally experienced while working on landing pages of my business.

But, before we deep dive into this, let’s first understand what is a landing page and what it is for?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is described as a web page on which a visitor can land on. But in the marketing realm, a landing page is a standalone page, different from your home page or any other web page, where your visitors lands after clicking on an ad. Or you can say it is a next step towards visitor becoming a customer. These pages can be lead generation based that typically allow visitors to download your information such as brochures, whitepapers, webinars or redeem other marketing offers like demos or coupons in return for a submission of visitors contact details via lead capture form or conversion form.

The Power of Landing Pages

A good landing page allows you to target your visitors, offer something that’s worth it, thus translating visitors into sales. You can even maintain multiple landing pages targeting segmented customer population. Any user can find your landing page via a general search or through your company website. This perhaps maximizes the chances that potential customer would end up there.

You’ve put great efforts in building your brand and creating a website around it. But to make sure your hard work converts into sales, you definitely need a lead conversion tool. If you’re looking for the same, landing page is a great way to go.

With an effective landing page, it is easy to drive great traffic, improve your SEO, and build your brand. Unfortunately, most of the marketers use landing pages to generate leads into conversion, but almost half of these clicks are redirected to home pages. Well, this is not a good strategy at all. So if you need to create conversions and build a customer base, creating a high-quality landing page is of utmost importance.

That being said, here, I’ve put together a list of some landing page problems that I’ve seen in the wild.

Low Conversion Rate

If there are visitors who click through to the offer on your landing page but you’re not getting them to complete the form, then this an indicator of low conversions or a low performing landing page.

High Bounce Rate

If you’ve ever seen the analytics of your landing page, then you might have seen this metric before. Bounce rate is a percentage of web users who visited your page or site, then left it without filling up any form or taking any required action. Poor conversion rate and higher bounce rate are interrelated as higher the bounce rate, lower will be the conversion rates.

Increased Cost per Conversion

If your landing page doesn’t have a clear path for your visitors to convert, then your landing page is going to cost you more per conversion.

Poor Quality Score

Google takes landing page relevance into account when calculating quality score. So if a landing page is not in unison with the headline, CTA, design and other elements, it doesn’t hold any relevance. For example, you’re running a PPC campaign for a long time but suddenly your PPC campaign stops yielding results. The key reason behind this is a poor quality score, which in turn leads to decline in your ROI thus affecting the performance of your landing page.

Less or No Traffic

You may have put together an awesome landing page, but what if your business or landing page is not visible in searches or it doesn’t show up anywhere. This means you need to optimize your landing page by working on SEO and promoting through channels that seem to be working.

Here are a few simple tweaks to achieve a low performing landing page:

Use Prominent Call-to-Action

When visitors click through to your landing page, obviously they want to take a specific action. And if there are none of the buttons that explicitly ask people to do a required action like buy, submit, you’re losing your potential leads. Your landing page is focused on a single purpose, and if is no specific call-to-action, you’ll have a negative effect on your conversion rate optimization.

Don’t include too many options; it will only hinder people from making choice. Trying to promote more than one thing on a single landing page will only wind up confusing people. If you give too many offers, you’ll lose more of your audience and your conversions will be low. So it has to be clear and tell users what happens if they click the button.

Make use of contrasting colors in your CTA button. It should be neither too small nor too big. Because it’s too small, your visitor may not notice it and if it’s too big it may distract from other content on your page. Place your CTA, where it results in highest conversions. You can even stick with the standards and put your CTA on the lower right side above the fold.

Improve Site Performance & Loading Time

Your visitors don’t hesitate to leave a page if it’s too slow to load. If visitors are leaving your page quickly without any interaction, certainly they’re not going to fill out a form or find something more about you. Slow loading times equal to high bounce rate and a low conversion rate.

You can use your Google Analytics account to monitor your site performance and speed. The Google page speed testing tool allows you to see how your site is performing and suggest any improvements that will help your page load times.

Besides that, you can try and test these measures: check browser speed, use browser caching, check country specific performance and compress the code.

Optimize your Images

If images on your landing pages are not able to draw and communicate visually, then they are of no use. Never place a low-quality image on a landing page just for the heck of it.

Do A/B testing to check how your page is performing, you may uncover that your landing page has too many or too large images. As such images relate to your page load time, optimize them ensuring they’re in the correct format and no larger than necessary. Use JPEG as the first option and PNG as second. Color depth should be as low as possible. Crop or resize the images.

Mobile Responsive

You may have a high bounce rate on mobile than that of the desktop. And if your design is not mobile responsive, you’re certainly losing out a valuable traffic and conversions. So, a mobile friendly design is a need of the hour.

Thereby, to make your page highly mobile responsive, optimize it by restricting users from downloading certain elements such as image maps, social widgets and anything that is responsible for slowing up the site. Responsive frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation offers a grid for prototyping of different mobile functionality and layouts. You need to serve the right text and limit the number of HTTP requests.

Win Visitor’s Trust

Your landing page copy helps your prospective customers determine whether you’re someone to be trusted. Trust is subjective of social proof and acceptance. Nowadays, people are more likely to turn to peers or trusted authority when they are in dilemma.

Customer reviews, testimonials, awards, recognition, certifications are trust signals that add credibility to the offer on your landing page. According to Emarketer, people trust customer reviews 12 times more than a product or service. You should only add real testimonials to fill the testimonial section of your landing page. If you don’t have, simply hide it. Give your social proof, a reality check.

Strike Relevance With Compelling Headline

If your headline simply tells the basic offer and nothing more, then you’re missing the opportunity to show what you’re about. Also, a poorly written and non-existent headline is probably one of the reasons that cause most people to just leave thus increasing the bounce rate and lowering the performance of your landing page.

The headline is the only thing people are going to read before they abandon your page. Create a headline that peaks curiosity, describe your intentions and entice your audience. Make sure your headline is relevant to the content and offer you’ve mentioned on the page. To put simply, keep your headline short, specific and clear. Make it big and bold so that it is the most visually heavy thing on your page.

Clear Value Proposition

If your page doesn’t have any clear proposition or enough information to pursue people to take any action, then your page is only screwing up your conversion rates.

Your value proposition is a promise of value or offers to be delivered. As value proposition is the most critical part of the landing page, it should tell people how it is better or different than every other similar offer.

Simple & User-friendly Design

If you have a poorly designed landing page, without proper CTA, it does not only increase your bounce rate but the quality score of your page is affected as well. This directly increases the cost of your Google ads. So higher the bounce rate, the more you’ve to pay for Google ads.

To make a simple and user-friendly design, use short and crisp copy, keep the content concise, avoid irrelevant pop-ups, use WordPress theme, ask little of the visitor and add only necessary or relevant links so that visitors have no doubt about the quality of your product and have a positive user experience.

Highlight the Core Benefits

If the landing page copy doesn’t focus on user benefits, your visitor will be no more interested to know more about your product or service. It would only result in poor conversion rates.

So the best landing page copy is one which clearly and quickly communicate the exact benefits of using your product or service.

Improve Ad Relevancy

If the destination URL doesn’t match your ad text, you’re sure to have a landing page with a high bounce rate. Other reason may be an absence of engaging content with clear navigation path.

Just as your ad text should be relevant to your keyword, your Google ad should be relevant to your landing page in order to earn good quality score. Technically speaking, Google considers the overall landing page experience, but ad relevancy plays a big role to improve user retention, generate leads and increasing the conversion opportunities.

Measure Your Landing Page Performance

You can only improve on things if you can measure your performance. Once you’ve set up a better performing landing page, you can track and manage leads with conversion tracking in Google Analytics or whatever you use. Employ A/B testing or split testing for maximum results. A good test is worth a thousand expert tips.

You can also use AdWords landing page grader to evaluate how your AdWords landing page and campaign is performing.

A landing page is a hub for lead generation efforts for your business. And fixing these problems on your page not only enhances the user experience but also improves your ROI to boost top-of-the funnel conversions.